Peter Lovesey: Diamond Dust

'I did stay out, ma'am.'

"What?'

'Ask DCI McGarvie. I haven't troubled him at all. When did we last speak?'

McGarvie glared and said, 'That isn't the point.'

'You ran what amounted to a parallel investigation,' Georgina steamed on. 'You visited the crime scenes and interviewed witnesses. What's that, if it isn't interference?'

'Am I prohibited from visiting the place where my wife was murdered? No one made that clear to me.'

McGarvie said, 'You also turned up at the scene of the Patricia Weather murder – even before I did.'

'Nobody barred me from other cases.'

'Come off it, Peter. We all know it was a carbon copy of your wife's shooting.'

'We didn't know at the time. Stormy Weather is an old colleague. I was with him at Fulham. I'm allowed to have some sympathy for an old mate who goes through a similar experience, aren't I?'

Georgina said, 'This is evasion. You teamed up with DCI Weather and drove all over the south of England like…' She turned to McGarvie for help, and got none. '… like a re-run of Starsky and Hutch.'

'If you knew my driving, ma'am, you wouldn't make that comparison.'

'Don't mess with me. You go off on your own without any consultation, riding roughshod over sensitive lines of enquiry, blundering into this safe house where the witness was being kept.'

'That was to enquire about Ted Dixon-Bligh, ma'am.'

'And you're going to justify it on the grounds that he was the killer.'

'No, ma'am. He was family.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'My wife's ex-husband. I wanted to see him on a family matter.'

Georgina made a puffing sound of irritation.

Diamond explained, unfazed, 'DCI McGarvie told me he was holed up somewhere, and the Met couldn't find him. You'll confirm those were your words, Curtis?'

McGarvie wasn't willing to confirm anything. He stared straight ahead.

'You don't seem to remember. You'd lost all interest in Dixon-Bligh, or so it appeared to me at the time. You were getting very interested in Joe Florida. What happened about Florida?'

'Released without charge,' McGarvie said after a pained pause. 'After eleven hours, he finally decided to tell us he had an alibi.'

'What was that?'

'He was having his car tyres replaced at a garage in Hammersmith.'

'True?'

'Confirmed, yes.'

'It took eleven hours to get that out of him?'

'The old tyres left a set of prints outside a betting shop that was torched the previous evening.'

'Back on the protection game?'

'Apparently.'

Diamond gave a sigh that was almost sympathetic. 'We can't win 'em all, can we? I helped trace Dixon-Bligh, as you know, but it was too late.'

Now McGarvie waded in. 'You knew he was wanted for questioning. If you'd informed me about this beach hut at West Wittering, I would have collared him.'

'I honestly didn't think about the beach hut until I was at the safe house.'

'You're trickier than a cage of monkeys.'

Georgina continued with the tongue-lashing. 'The whole point is that your actions would have undermined a prosecution against this man. It's lucky for you he's dead.'

This time he was silent. He'd made all the points he wanted.

Georgina banged on for a few minutes more, saying she'd considered formally disciplining him and it was only because of the tragedy of Steph's murder that she chose to be compassionate.

He didn't thank her.

He was on the point of leaving when she seemed to relent a little, maybe deciding she'd taken too strong a line. 'It's brought closure, anyway, Peter.'

'What do you mean?'

'The man is dead.'

'That's closure?' he said in a flat voice.

'In the sense that we can draw a line under the investigation. I realise it doesn't put an end to your personal grief.'

He was silent.

Georgina asked, 'Did you have any suspicion Dixon-Bligh was involved with this Arab group?'

'Not till I was told, ma'am.'

'The manner of his death – removing his tongue -seems particularly brutal. I'm told it's considered a just punishment for an informer. In their society a thief has his hand cut off.'

'I've heard.'

'There's no question that it was an act of revenge by the diamond robbers?'

'That's the strong assumption.'

'They'll be out of the country by now.'

'I expect so.'

'Difficult, bringing international criminals to justice. Still, it's the Yard's problem, not ours. We're left with some tidying up of our own. It's time for some co-operation between you two. Curtis will need chapter and verse from you, every bit of evidence that seals Dixon-Bligh's guilt. It has to be written up before we can close the file. I rely on you, Peter, to pass on your findings. It will be hard for you, I appreciate, but a necessary duty.'

'Bit of a turnaround,' he commented.

'What?'

'You warn me off, tell me not to show my face in the incident room, and now you want me to tell him how it was done. Cool.'

Not merely cool. In that atmosphere you could have preserved a mammoth for a million years.

'Well, I've got good news for you, Curtis,' Diamond filled the silence. 'You won't have to put up with those findings of mine, because they don't exist.'

'Just what do you mean by that?' Georgina asked.

'Dixon-Bligh didn't murder my wife.'

'For God's sake, Peter.'

'Will you hear me out?'

She sighed and leaned back in her chair.

Diamond said, 'I almost convinced myself he was the killer when I heard he was a junkie. It provided the selfish, blinkered, crazed motive I was looking for. But something didn't fit. I also learned yesterday that he was a chef at the Dorchester.'

Georgina took a deep, audible breath. 'We know about that.'

He nodded. 'But you didn't follow it up.'

'What do you mean – "follow it up"?'

'I did. This morning I phoned the Dorchester and asked if they happened to know if he reported for duty on February the twenty-third, the morning Steph was murdered. Yes, they said, he was in the kitchen, cooking.'

'This I refuse to believe,' McGarvie said to Georgina as if Diamond had finally flipped. 'How would anyone remember one day in February?'

'Because it was Shrove Tuesday – Pancake Day.'

'So?'

'People in the catering business remember Pancake Day. The Dorchester put on a big charity lunch hosted by the Variety Club of Great Britain. All the catering staff were there from early in the morning. It was one of the biggest lunches of the year.'

'Is this certain?'

'Dixon-Bligh was in the kitchen at the Dorchester cooking three hundred pancakes.'

'So he was definitely innocent?'

'Of murdering Steph? Yes. And almost certainly of murdering Patsy Weather. But there's no question he was involved in the diamond heist that went wrong. His fatal mistake was blabbing to his girlfriend.'

For some minutes after Diamond left Georgina's office, nothing was said. McGarvie sat in the armchair shaking his head at intervals.

Eventually, Georgina said, 'He's a loose cannon with a habit of hitting the target. A good detective. The best. I only said the things I did because I thought he'd cracked this, gone off and cracked it, and hung you out to dry.'

'I know, ma'am.'

'But he failed. We all failed. This was one of those wretched cases that beat everyone.'

On the first day of November, Curtis McGarvie's overtime budget was cancelled by Headquarters. Inevitably, the Stephanie Diamond inquiry was scaled down drastically, and the decision came almost as a relief to the team. They'd run through their options. Nothing new had come up. McGarvie remained in charge, with Halliwell as his deputy, assisted by three CID officers and two civilian computer operators. These days they rarely stepped outside the incident room.